REED DANCE - LONE VOICE FROM HOME

Among all the excited prose published in the Swazi Press over the past week about the Reed Dance, there has been one quiet, thoughtful voice that deserves recognition.

Musa Hlophe, writing in the Times Sunday (2 September 2007), did something that is virtually unheard of in Swazi journalism: he put a news story into some context.

Media folk had been crowing all week that at least 100,000 ‘maidens’ had signed up for the celebrations. This is up from the 30,000 who were said to have taken part in 2006. No explanation was offered by the journalists for this increase in interest since last year. (I am giving the Swazi media the benefit of the doubt on the numbers, although some foreign media put the number closer to 40,000, not 100,000).

Hlophe thinks he might have the answer. He reminds us that at the Reed Dance most of the girls received their first decent meal in a very long time. Now, the show is over they only have grinding poverty to look forward to and the hundreds of trucks ferrying the thousands of girls to the Reed Dance could have been better used to deliver the much needed water and foodstuff to Swaziland’s starving population.

Hlophe wrote,

‘Judging from the appearances of these dancing girls, one may be fooled into thinking all is well in the kingdom of Eswatini.

‘What will be hidden to the unsuspecting outsider is that most of these girls will have had a balanced meal while at the Reed Dance. That most of these girls (about 80 per cent of them) come from families who are among the 500,000 people who survive on food aid. After all the glamour of this week’s events, these girls return to grinding poverty by Tuesday or Wednesday or whenever their masters feel they are now disposable, having fulfilled their responsibilities to our rulers and their visitors.

‘What the unsuspecting visitors do not know is that Swaziland is a country in serious crisis. It is said we are still number one in the world, with the highest HIV prevalence rates, notwithstanding the slight reduction, We are a country with diminishing opportunities for foreign direct investments, with 70 per cent of the country’s population living on less than one dollar a day.

‘Further compounded by one of the severest drought in living memory, Swaziland would not be expected to be celebrating the way it seems to be just now. The hundreds of trucks ferrying the thousands of girls to Ludzidzini could have been used to deliver the much needed water and foodstuff to the starving population.

‘But who counts in Swaziland are the people among the ruling elite. In Swaziland, the poor have no rights or needs of their own. The ruling elite will now and again run charities for the poor and elderly ad the poor take these as some form of generosity by their masters.’

Musa Hlophe writes a weekly column in the Times Sunday.